[Music] what do you really want for your children you want them to be happy healthy able to relate to other people have the ability to set goals and to make good decisions if we don't teach them in school a lot of children are not getting these most basic most important critical life skills our children are begging us for the right to believe in themselves and the right to be inspired the children are crying out and saying I don't see purpose in my life I don't have a dream anymore you make achievements but you never get
to the top like okay I'm going to go to school go what's the value if I'm not even going to be able to relate to [Music] anyone Seal's trying to bring a balance to the individual and what are the personal competencies you need to develop to be successful how do you pull them all together so that kids can relate and navigate the world more effectively there's a great demand and it's a growing demand I think it comes from all kinds of sectors it comes from the business world who believes that the biggest skill problem we
have is not technical skills it's the ability to work together with others they want them to be collaborative communicative creative be able to work in a group setting and so for us it's a huge part of that students education we want for kids to embrace one another to accept people for who they are to know how to relate to one another to know how to understand themselves [Music] it helps me have a happier brain and be more efficient definitely straightened down my life um I can't I I can't even like pick where to begin it
just teaches you how just to be empathetic towards others and how to listen and I don't know how to care all right it's really about developing those attitudes skills and knowledge that allows a student and an adult to um achieve that um that approach to how they will work as a person we have the evidence we know it works we have the compelling argument that we need the whole child I think it is our time to really capitalize on it we actually do have evidence now we did not have it 15 years ago I mean
to be fair we were in the R&D phase in the field of social emotional learning we're not in that phase anymore content is more and more of a commodity children own what they want now at very young ages they will become self-directed they can find out the dates of the Civil War without learning it from a teacher so the question that they're bringing to school is who am I how do I work with you how do we build a team what is our purpose where do I fit that nurture children to believe that it's worth
[Music] learning more of our administrators are bringing this back to their F Castle is the community of people trying to build this field it has people in it that talk about their work as deeper learning as grit as empathy as character there's lots of different brands in the world just like there are lots of different people who teach mathematics different ways but they all join together in feeling that they're a part of a mathematics Community Castle is the community of people committed to educating the heart inspiring the Mind Castle is a collaborative uh and that's
important our name collaborative for academic social and emotional learning the C and the L the collaboration and the learning the openness to learning the knowledge that there are other people out there doing good work and we want to capitalize and develop that work as well as our work and think about ways things fit together the collaborative side of Castle and the learning side are really important we work in research we work in practice and we work in policy and we committed ourselves to a school change strategy we spent the last 20 years learning about and
studying social and emotional learning we've written many books and guides and have been deeply immersed in this work we then took the very research orientation to practice in large urban districts to help districts Implement systemic seal at the district level at the building level at the classroom level it's exciting to be at a place in time where we as a country finally know enough about how kids are going to learn and learn best that it is making it possible for school districts to really Embrace this work the good news is we now have some degree
of evidence that says the country could actually change not just a classroom or school but the country could change we can reduce violence we can reduce truancy reduce disengagement reduce anxiety and at the same time we can promote better academic test scores we can promote more positive sense of self the only question isn't can we or or how can we the question is will we [Music]
